[plug] [link] Open Source win in Mass. US

[James Devenish]

In message <Pine.LNX.4.44.0310211034220.3490-100000 at BBRH73.busby.net>
on Tue, Oct 21, 2003 at 10:39:12AM +0800, Bret Busby wrote:
> On Mon, 20 Oct 2003, Ben Jensz wrote:
> > THE US state of Massachusetts has instructed its chief technology
> > officer to adopt a policy of "open standards, open source" for all
> > future spending on information technology.
[...]
> There is a problem that I see with such policies. I believe that such a 
> policy, makes a site a "closed shop", which I think is as bad as being 
> exclusively MS, or any other company.

Be careful of your interpretation of "open", Ben. Concepts of "open" and
"free" have been hijacked by "the open source movement" and the Free
Software Foundation, but it's not always as bad as the FSF would have
you believe. With particular reference to your comments about "closed
shops", there is a different interpretation of "open source" than the
one that you might be responding to. (I assume you're not arguing with
"open standards".) In the case of the above article, there's no reason
to think that "open source" means anything more sophisticated than
"users have access to the source code of the software they're using".
That doesn't mean "open to the world", necessarily. For example,
Microsoft could show its source only to the State and not share it with
anyone else. Thus, the State is not necessarily the "closed shop" that
you might have been suspecting.


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